Below are the responses submitted for my progress update to RLUK and AHRC, ahead of our meeting on Tuesday 29 November. This provides an opportunity to reflect on my experiences, opportunities and challenges encountered during the fellowship, and how my research is enabling me to reflect on, and develop, my professional practice.

What are the main activities that you have undertaken as part of your fellowship to date? These might include literature reviews, research trips, or interviews.

WORKSTREAM 1: NEW LIBRARY SERVICE AND TRAINING TO SUPPORT RESEARCHERS IN PUBLISHING DIGITAL OUTPUTS VIA ALMA DIGITAL

  • Testing to define and diagnose IIIF functionality issues with Alma Digital following an update by the supplier (Ex Libris).
  • Developing and documenting short-term workarounds to allow the successful delivery of time-sensitive projects affected by this failure of functionality.
  • Extensive liaison and network building with relevant technical communities to obtain guidance and support with these issues. I have reached out to Ex Libris developers, as well as Alma Digital, IIIF, and Universal Viewer user communities via Twitter and Slack.
  • Writing and delivering a paper at the WHELF 2022 conference (Welsh Higher Education Libraries Forum), attended by library staff from Welsh HEIs. This was a significant event in terms of promoting Alma Digital for research, as it was attended exclusively by potential customers. Ex Libris supplies Alma, a Library Management System, to all HEIs in Wales as part of a consortium contract, but Cardiff University is the first among them to adopt Alma Digital as an image repository. Due to its ease of integration with the Alma LMS, conference attendees were keen to hear about our experiences with Alma Digital. The paper aimed to raise awareness of the IIIF functionality offered by Alma Digital, and the ways in which it allows content to be interoperably distributed to a wide range of teaching and research outputs.
  • Writing and delivering a paper at an international annual conference - IGeLU (International Group of Ex Libris Users). Since writing the paper for WHELF, the IIIF functionality I had promoted had been lost following a software update. I had raised a case via Ex Libris’ service desk over a month prior to submitting my paper to their conference, but the issue had not been be addressed. As I could no longer demonstrate the features I had described in the WHELF paper, I used the conference as an opportunity to respectfully raise the problems that have been caused by the update, and the impact they have been having on my own and others’ research. This raised awareness of the significance of Alma Digital’s compromised IIIF functionality, and expedited a response from the Alma Digital project owner and his development team. The case has now been assigned the highest priority level for investigation by Ex Libris, though at the time of writing, remains unresolved.
  • Developing ingest workflows to support the load of content for Crowd Cymru (a National Lottery-funded crowdsourcing project) and a student internship (School of Architecture), establishing the potential and limits of Alma Digital.
  • Continuing my involvement in the IIIF community. The IIIF Consortium is run by just three key members of staff - I was recently asked to join the recruitment panel for their third staff member, alongside Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass, Collections Data Manager at Yale University. I am also a member of the Planning Committee for the IIIF Winter conference, alongside Mark Baggett, Head of Digital Initiatives at University of Tennessee. Since my Fellowship began, I have been appointed Chair of the IIIF Archives Community Group. The group hosts meetings attended by the global IIIF community, featuring presentations and discussions relating to the intersection of IIIF and archives. In this role, I have aimed to increased engagement with IIIF among digital practitioners working in archives in the UK. Over the last three meetings, overall attendance has quadrupled, and attendance from UK representatives has increased from none to 50% to 90%.

WORKSTREAM 2: TRAINING IN DIGITAL EXHIBITION TOOLS AND DH TOOLS

  • Completing self-guided training in GitHub and Jekyll to set up a static website to use as a blog. As well as using this to document progress, it has formed part of my research – a proof of concept model for delivering free, secure hosting without adverts or branding.
  • Developing a proof of concept Xerte-hosted website to support a student internship in the School of Welsh, testing its functionality and limitations.
  • Requirements gathering, design and delivery of a lecture on Digitisation and Digital Archives for all postgraduate students in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion, which has been authorised as a mandatory research methods session for future years.
  • Completing self-guided training in Wax to set up a small demo online exhibition and digital archive. Supported by Jekyll, this is another means of providing free scholarly hosting without adverts or branding, as well as delivering IIIF images without centralised infrastructure. I have been documenting my methods and learning process via the blog, and this will form the basis of a tutorial for others to follow.
  • Continuing self-guided training in responsive web design via Free Code Camp.

What work do you intend to undertake in the near future during your fellowship?

  • A student internship in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion has generated a resource guide to historic maps. I intend to transfer the images and copy to a Wax exhibit, to assess the functionality of this platform to support student projects.
  • A review of online exhibition platforms - their pros, cons, limits, functionality, and scope for integration.
  • Researching and writing training materials suitable for an introduction to digital humanities sessions, for delivery to undergraduate and postgraduates in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy in 2023/24

Please describe how you have worked with your mentor and any future meetings planned.

  • In August, with funding from a separate project grant, I visited University of Wyoming with my mentor, Prof. Julia Thomas, and had many useful meetings with our equivalents to exchange practices and ideas related to digital humanities training, online exhibitions, digitisation workflows, and digital platforms. We meet monthly to discuss fellowship progress.

Has anything surprised you? Have you had any unexpected findings?

  • My first goal was to explore the capacity and limitations of Alma Digital - what can it do? What can’t it do? What tools can it integrate with? What can be changed? What needs more work, development, or investment? In the first days of the fellowship, I discovered a critical issue with IIIF integration, which had arisen following a recent software update. This rendered many of my research questions unanswerable, as almost all IIIF functionality had failed.

Have you had to adapt your research due to any unexpected circumstances/findings?

  • The issue prevented both the research and testing of any of the tools and platforms that I’d planned, and so instead, the first couple of months were dedicated to trialling, documenting, liaising, and lobbying for the issue to be rectified by the software company, as well as developing workarounds to repair existing projects and commitments.

What plans do you have to share your findings within your institution/within the sector?

Is there anything else that you would like to tell us or feedback regarding your fellowship to date?

  • I’ve valued the monthly check-in meetings with the other fellowship recipients - it’s been reassuring to learn that I’m not the only person whose research has not gone quite according to plan, and we’ve formed a useful support network.